I can't recommend books, but I can do oeuvres. If you only read three authors in your life: Thoreau, Dostoevsky, and Austen. Austen is optional.

We read Thoreau in American Writers last week, and my deep affection for him welled up all over again. I realized that Walden completely altered my sixteen-year-old self's conception of the world even more than I thought it did—so much of what he asserts underlies the way I approach things. I definitely read it twice during high school, and after the excerpts we went through in our anthology, I feel like I need to go it again. I wanted to collect the most striking passages that I came away with this time around, so I've assembled them here. They're all from "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" and "Conclusion."

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. . . . To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale . . . If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence—that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. . . . The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts from its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. . . . Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might perhaps be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness.